DelaMorte: we kill out of indifference . . . out of love sometimes . . . But never out of hate. Now I don't know who's dead or alive. I'm sick of killing. So I'm leaving the game, brother. DelaMorte, DelAmore, bids you farewell, and is on his way.

Death: Where to?

DelaMorte: Better get out of here. Even the statues are talking.

Death: Where do you think you're going, if you haven't yet understood the difference, between Life, and Me?

--- Cemetery Man

Gentoo continues compiling. CS Capstone is on hold, until further notice, or my termination at the hands of my advisor. Math Capstone continues unabated, progress degrading only as consciousness itself is reduced to its finest particles in a swirling haze of caffeine and keyboard clicks. I'm sick of playing the game, Fairest, so for now, I relent. Again, with the relenting. So much to explain, and, for what it's worth, maybe I'll never be able to. Letters never sent.

I want to hold and kiss you in Paris,
I want to hold your hand in Rome
I want to run naked in a rainstorm
Make love, in a train, cross-country,
You put this in me
So now what, so now what?
Wating,
Needing,
Waiting
For you to justify my love

Hoping,
Praying
For you to justify my love

I want to know you
Not like thatI don't wanna be your mother
I don't wanna be your sister either
I just wanna be your lover
I wanna be your baby
Kiss me,
That's right,
kiss me . . .
--- Justify My Love, Madonna and Lenny Kravitz
(As covered by Front Line Assembly and Delerium)

As I sweat blood (see previous entry), I've been watching the progress of Gentoo Linux (PPC) on my Titanium Powerbook. For those of you who didn't know, yes, I succumbed to purchase the only laptop on Earth that could possibly appease the car mentality in everybody (and by everybody I mean me, and by me, I mean not Ian. BTW - I found your distribution, Ian!)

What there is to be shrunken, is first stretched out
What there is to be weakened, is first made strong
What there will be withdrawn, is first bestowed
What there will be thrown over, is first raised up
. ..
Try to wash off blood with blood -
Think no evil

Do without doing
Know without knowing
Get without getting
Go without going . ..
--- Blood, KMFDM

Capstones are doing this to me. It's really my fault, I guess. I'm trying to be Zen about my eventual annihilation at my own keyboard, by my own hands, sentence by sentence. If I had only made the decision to choose a different advisor, then maybe it would have all been different.

A long day when you write three things down in your journal, and you don't remember most of them by 9 at night. I know I said several important things, but I can't remember what they are in exact detail. (But the nice thing is I get to read them again and remember)

Today in combinatorics we had a beauty contest - for proofs of Turon's theorem. That is to say, which proof was most elegant and aesthetically pleasing. It's one of the weirdest arguments you'll ever get into with somebody else saying things like "well, I like the way Peter's proof wore the inductive hypothesis, but it was just clunky on Gitch's proof." Like an inductive hypothesis is a mink, or something. Yeah, I'm already tired - if you couldn't tell already.

I don't think I have the ability to be mad at somebody for something right away. Hell, I didn't stop talking to Kale (who is, for the record, the only person I've ever told I would never speak to again until they cleaned up their act) for more than three years. Lately, well, I don't know. I do what I do - and some people handle that, and others don't.

There are few people who will seek me out if they haven't seen me lately. I'm here - that's where I'll be, if you ever decide that you miss me. The workload right now, whether or not I'm doing it at any given moment, feels like a giant load of something heavy above my head - so I'm afraid to move too much, or say too much, no matter how badly I want to talk to somebody, or how much I wish they missed me.

Sometimes, I get really annoyed when people start griping about logic. Logic is fallible, and can be misapplied in dozens of ways. It's a stupid way to live your life- that's why we're human. If we were only logic, we'd be machines, but we have emotions, and reasoning that extends beyond the bounds of logic. Hint: What does the set of all x such that x is not in S look like? Some people blow this off as a bullshit paradox, but it has serious problems. Is the opposite of falsehood always true? Is the negation of a truthful statement always false? As a hacker, you learn to think in shades of grey, not black and white. It's the system's job to behave in black and white, and the hacker's to see the world as shades of grey. It doesn't matter if you're hacking Wittgenstein or a Linux box - it's the same principle.

Language sucks for communication - but we still want to do it anyway - why is this a problem? When you pour a cup of milk in a bowl, did you pour exactly a cup of milk? No? Does it matter? NO? Well, there you go.

I'm just tired and grumpy, and sick of hearing people blather about logic and language and the failings of human reasoning, and wanting everything to be perfect. The world is not perfect, nor does it have that potential - it can be better than bad, and most of the time it downright sucks for everybody involved - and trying to make it perfect doesn't do anybody any good, because it's too much to chew on at once. Logic is a tool - if you live by logic, logic lives by you, and it leaves room for precious little else. Think of memes - think of Zen. But most importantly, think outside the binary operations. That's what consciousness is - that's why G&#246del's Incompleteness Theorem only applies to machines, and not to humans. Free. Your. Mind.

If you want to bring a centipede to a crashing halt, ask it in which order it moves its legs.

You don't need a lid on a basket of crabs. If one tries to climb out the others will pull it back down.

Don't be so proud. You are not an intelligence until you pass the Turing test.

The great mass of men lead lives of quiet domestication.

The blind man looking in the mirror cannot see he has no eyes. So what?

You know, it's like Burger Time, only in stunning, like-like color. With laundry. Or something

This next part is for the mostly non-Slashdot crowd out there, who are used to LiveJournal and know me in real life. For the most part, I write stupid things about my stupid life, and people refuse to suspend their disbelief long enough to participate in my grand experiment. This isn't a journal, or a diary - it's a place to talk to me without me being there. Talk to me with only words - I can't even see a silly little avatar to tell me who you are. And if you don't have a Slashdot Id, everything will be posted under Anonymous Coward until you make one. It shouldn't take too long to think of even the lamest thing to say - I mean, it's not like I intend this to be the Vienna Circle or anything (not even the Warren Ellis forum, for crying out loud). I mean, have you seen the articles on the front page? There are people out there who aren't even talking about ANYTHING! The biggest reason I started this is because I don't see people enough, because I have work to do. Lots of it. And even if I wanted to see everybody in person, I couldn't. All I want you to do is talk to me. The written medium is different - it's for different things. Sign posts if you want to. Keep me guessing. Pharsh.

For those of you who hate the computer stuff, (which is my main reason for bitching on Any Given Day &trademark ), notice the new feature I've hand-coded in the sample paragraph below:

&lt AGAIN WITH THE COMPUTER STUFF &gt Speaking of bad graphics, Slivey was trying to play some games on the new laptop (T-PBook with YellowDawg on it), and you know what? 8-bit graphics at resolutions greater than 800x600 look REALLY BAD. He was playing (x)kTaipei (or MahJongh, sorry if my inability to spell the game I grew up thinking was "Taipei" is wrong), and he kept failing because he couldn't tell the difference between any of the tiles. So, here's a prayer to the ATI Mobility 6 xfree86 driver developers for divine inspiration and a steady hand. &lt END COMPUTER STUFF &gt

Come to think of it, I'm not doing laundry tonight. I'm doing it tomorrow, when I don't have to sleep. I can sleep on a bed with no sheets again - it's actually okay if you just wear a bathrobe and stuff.

This neurotic pursuit of sanity is driving us all crazy.

Half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at.

Reality can be useful.
--- Selected Sayings of Solomon Short (aka Robert Heinlein)

I'd like to live alone,
but it's crowded inside, sometimes-
Look right into another's eye
I thought I could fly,
but that has been done before.
I'm feeling empty - empty inside
A life I never knew, a room without a view,
My life begins anew, my life it ends anew
It's like I've never never never never never been here before
--- Never, Gravity Kills

Remember - when your body tells you to stay awake some more, that 3:00 in the morning isn't too late, that's when you swat it to the ground. Just swat it to the ground. I saw the following quote in the discussion about robots cheering up the elderly - I think it's funny, but it's also disturbingly close to the mindset of some of the people who work at the nursing home in my hometown:

"Old people don't need companionship. They need to be isolated and studied so it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be extracted for our personal use."

-Homer Simpson

Now I have to eat, finish writing exercises, and combinatorics homework. Yippy skippy.

PS - (for bonus points) - When somebody asks you to fill in the song lyric for " Who loves you? And who do you love? WHO LOVES YOU? AND WHO DO YOU LOVE? &lt insert something here &gt", the answer is "The Messiah, The Messiah" .

"should not be confused with jumping to conclusions." As Operation Archangel comes to a close, with the first drafts barely done, sources internal to the D.O.C. ("Device Optimized for Calculation") of the N.I.C.K ("Networked Individuals Calibrated for Killing") task force report a solidly losing battle on both the Mathematics front and the Computer Science Front. Since this is a battle of minds versus abstract fields of study, there are no photographs per se, at this point. Content yourself with text.

That is all from the capstone front. We now return you to your regularly scheduled domestic news reports as our coverage of Operation:PleaseDon'tFuckThisUp,Doc (O:PDFTUD) continues.

Occasionally, I wonder what it would be like if my name really were Doc. What my life would be like, all of these people not knowing my true name (not even me). Wait, that's like it is, right now. Shit.

Sometimes, I wonder if people think that I withdraw from everybody else because I seek a higher solitude -- I wonder how many people realize that most of the time, I'm just really scared, or disgusted, or I want to talk to somebody alone, and not with 30 people around. But there's also a trend of geeks and gamers to make tight work bonds (within small groups) and bonds of solitude (not really any tighter than that, I suppose), with no means to pull them away from their respective Fortresses of Solitude. They're like Superman when they're in there, I swear. Which is also why I want to lure them into my own den, I suppose - because like most geeks, my computer is Earth's yellow sun, and it gives me my power, or something.

We have observed a tendency in the test subject to maintain irregular working patterns of sleep, while still not managing to accomplish that much, actually. I am beginning to believe that his methods are . . . unsound.

Rather than really get to think about the question, we are hurtled 800,000 years into the future, a time when the art of storytelling has died and actors parade through corny-looking sets in search of narrative and big explosions.

I have a new workspace now for all of my capstone-related programs, called "PITT." Again, Buckaroo Banzai is owning my mind. By capstone-related programs, I of course mean emacs, xdvi, and xterm. They work fine - but lately, other stuff just doesn't. (This is the part where Doc just starts bitching about stupid computer things, so if you like, you can skip ahead to the part that says "Puppies.")

Ispent about two hours trying to get wxGTK to compile so that I could use Audacity as a wav file editor. Not only did it not compile, it was gagging on its own source files with problems, most of which I was in no position to fix. (I don't care if it has joystick support, but apparently the project manager will burn in hell before people have wxGTK without that option.) Also, the available help can be boiled down to "almost all of your compilation problems are solved by using egcs - we can't fix gcc" (which is odd, because the two projects merged MORE THAN TWO YEARS AGO!!!!) and "make sure your configuration of gtk+ is correct." (trust me bucko, it works for consarning everything else, alright?)

I'm running linux 2.4.18 right now, and I get the weirdest moments when my computer just freezes for a few seconds, and I can hear my disks syncing, and my cdrom spinning, like it was syncing all of the i/o, for some reason. This is probably well-documented somewhere, and part of the mindset of "don't even bother upgrading beyond 2.4.17, they just go crazy there." It's just annoying sometimes.

PUPPIES!

I like puppies. But the demons of computer security engineering and planar graph separators are calling me again. Wish me luck, and pray for my eternal soul.

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way, and wish I'd wear
The robe and crown, Good Lord show me the way-
Oh brothers, let's go down, let's go down, come on down
Come on brothers, let's go down, down in the river to pray. -- Down to the River to Pray, Allison Krauss

A long time ago, there was a girl named Crystal. After she broke my heart, I've never really been the same. The details, for now, are not important - I'm still trying to work those out. And not so long ago, I saw a girl who looked exactly like her - Fish's best friend. How do I explain this to Fish so that I don't sound like a depraved lunatic? Well, I told myself that I didn't care how depraved I sounded, and I just told her, most of it. Fish has never looked at me like that before - maybe after "break" she'll understand when I try to explain to her. Maybe not. Right now, that's the fourth biggest problem I have on my plate.

Capstones, bloody capstones. There I said it. That leaves out problems first and second. Problem three is the most complex, the most erudite - feh feh. A pox on problem three.

Spring break at home is something I should never do again- I never get anything done. Not that I'm a workaholic at school, and seeing as how I only have one somester left, I won't have this problem again. It wasn't particularly resting, or enlightening, and in fact, since getting back, my knee has been bothering me something awful. If I had anything remotely approaching an active lifestyle, I suppose that would make sense. Right now, it doesn't. And all my other books for my capstones are sitting in the mail room right now - which won't be open until Monday. And my laptop - that's there too. Feh feh. A pox on your "mail room."

Since I don't have a printer, I use CronosII for mail, and some tin variant for news, the time you spend optimizing the living hell out of the code is almost gained back by removing debugging features and stuff I never use. I had no idea, that Mozilla could be so fast - like I can actually FEEL that I'm connected to a T1, and click on a page, and it doesn't churn/sputter/render for a while. It just happens. And so far, it's been pretty stable (9.9, anyways). Thank you Mozilla . . . thank you. When I have another spare day away, I think I'll add the expensive optimations to the optimization flag.;)

It just sucks. It's long, hard, and tedious. And it's all graph theory. And my head is fuzzy- not like when I shaved it - like when I'm drunk. But not on alcohol - math. This is pure, 198 proof math. Somewhere in the world, there is a Mathematics still, and it's churning just for me - and all of my fellow Combinatorics students, I suppose.

Progress on the dance front is going full steam. The theme is "Robots, Sex, and Death" - and I'm death. "Would you like a sugar cookie? I made them myself . .."

There's a rusted halo on my head
It must have been something that I said
This is the dawn of my betrayal
This is the final broken nail
Fill this hole
Suck this soul
I am the thing that I can't control
--- Flesh, KMFDM

Conflict and dissatisfaction of one sort or another enforce the need for the compensations indicated by the + group.

Your Stress Sources

Has an unsatisfied need to ally himself with others whose standards are as high as his own, and to stand out from the herd. His control of his sensual instincts restricts his ability to give himself, but the resulting isolation leads to the urge to surrender and allow himself to merge with another. This disturbs him, as such instincts are regarded as weaknesses to be overcome; he feels that only by continued self-restraint can he hope to maintain his attitude of individual superiority. Wants to be loved or admired for himself alone; needs attention, recognition, and the esteem of others.

Your Restrained Characteristics

Feels that he is receiving less than his share and that there is no one on who he can rely for sympathy and understanding. Pent-up emotions make him quick to take offense, but he realizes that he has to make the best of things as they are.

Trying to calm down and unwind after a period of over-agitation which has left him listless and devoid of energy. In need of peace and quiet; becomes irritable if this is denied him.

Your Desired Objective

Seeks an affectionate relationship, offering fulfillment and happiness. Capable of powerful emotional enthusiasm. Helpful, and willing to adapt himself if necessary to realize the bond of affection he desires. Needs the same consideration and understanding from others.

Your Actual Problem

Needs to achieve a stable and peaceful condition, enabling him to free himself of the worry that he may be prevented from achieving all the things he wants.

Your Actual Problem #2

Wants to be valued and respected, and seeks this from a close and peaceful association of mutual esteem.